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Improving Leak Detection System Design Redundancy & Accuracy

Leak detection systems are an important part of any overall pipeline safety and integrity strategy. The benefits of reliably and rapidly identifying a leak, so that the resulting fluid loss can be controlled and contained as soon as possible, can be very significant, particularly in High Consequence Areas (HCAs). The mission of this project is standardize the approach to designing an appropriate Leak Detection System (LDS) for all pipelines, and that will be accessible to all operators – including the smaller ones – without extended and laborious front-end engineering. A central part of this approach is to concentrate upon certain key issues: (1) Beginning any LDS design process with a systematic focus on assessing requirements. (2) Accepting that one single technology will probably not provide perfect performance for all objectives, on a given pipeline. Therefore, a key issue is exploring ways to combine multiple technologies/physical principles into one system in order to address each requirement optimally. (3) Allowing the operator to be able to predict performance – and therefore cost/benefit – more reliably from the design.